The Category P Features, Projections, Interpretation

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inability of the Dative PP to do so (15c), is fully consistent with the conclusion that
Locative and Directional Ps are predicates, whereas the Dative P is not. 5
(15) a. ha-sefer mitaxat le-šulxan
the-book under to-table
“The book is under a table.”
b. ?ha-tiyul hu le-hodu 6
the-trip he to-India
Intended meaning: “The trip is to India.”
c. *ha-sefer hu le-rina (possible only if le- is interpreted as ‘for’)
the-book he to-Rina
To summarize, the P in the Dative construction, unlike the Locative and the
Directional Ps, is not a predicate. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that its function
is not P R , but rather P C . In the following section I will establish this conclusion and
address in more detail the syntactic realization of the Dative P, focusing mainly on
Hebrew. I will return to the Locative and Directional PPs in the subsequent sections.
4.2 The Dative P-morpheme in Hebrew
In this section I focus mainly on the syntactic realization of the Hebrew Dative P-
morpheme le- (‘to’). Before I address the issue, the following clarification is in place.
On the assumption that the Dative P is P C , the question arises why the Dative
construction is analyzed together with Directional and Locative constructions, rather
than with PP-verb constructions (chapter 3).
As already mentioned, in some languages, including Hebrew, English, French and
German, the preposition occurring in the Dative and Directional constructions is the
same (e.g. to). This is probably one of the reasons that these constructions seem
identical. However, a systematic comparison of the constructions conducted in this
5 The grammaticality contrast between (15a) and (15b) is significant. I will return to it in section 4.3.
6 I will address the distribution of the Hebrew pronominal copula (hu in (15b,c)) in section 4.4. For now it
will suffice to mention that it is obligatory with all PPs except the Locative ones (15a).